Spectator Sport

It’s funny how certain memories survive the passage of time.  I’m not sure which night it was—March 19^th or 20^th—but I distinctly remember my eyes being riveted to the screen of one of the TVs in the student union watering hole.

I was a graduate student in the spring of 2003.  I enrolled a year and a half earlier after being released from the armed forces.  The 9/11 attacks occurred during the third week of my first semester and had cast a pall over my studies from then on.  The ensuing war in Afghanistan seemed remote, however, and I did not dwell much on the relatively small number of servicemembers serving there.

The preparations for the invasion of Iraq in the summer and fall of 2002 filled me with renewed anxiety.  I knew people I served with would inevitably become mixed up in it.  The Bush administration’s absurd claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, as well as the mistaken belief among many Americans at the time that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, made the impending conflict all the more worrisome.  The consensus among my fellow students and professors was that the war would end in disaster.

And so I found myself standing with a clutch of students watching the promised shock and awe unfold.  One of my professors, a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy, stood with us slowly shaking his head before wandering off.  Those of us who stayed drowned the rest of the evening in pitchers of beer until we were chased out at closing time.

The war hung over the remaining year or so of my master’s program.  I led classroom discussions on the subject and was a panelist on a graduate student panel on its possible consequences the week President Bush declared the active phase of the war over whilst standing in front of the notorious “Mission Accomplished” banner. 

Part of me wanted to believe that last part.  But my initial pessimism was rewarded as insurgency gripped Iraq.  I wrapped up the program upon completing my master’s thesis, a gloomy tome critiquing the flaws in neoconservative foreign policy preferences.  Seems quaint looking back.

I’ve commented on it elsewhere in this space, but I believe the public is too deferential to the military as an institution.  The path was set during the Reagan years and the media spectacle of the Gulf War confirmed it.  Thanks to our all-volunteer armed forces, war had become a spectator sport. The lopsided victory over Iraq, together with the high-profile media presence of uniformed leaders such as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf undoubtably contributed to the widespread support.  Several polls during the 1990s counted the military among the country's most trusted institutions.

The early mass protests notwithstanding, there was surprisingly little pushback against the intervention as it went awry over the ensuing years.  We can attribute some of this to the so-called rally effect and a reluctance to be seen as somehow disloyal.  It didn’t hurt that the relative success of the 2007 surge permitted a somewhat graceful exit later on. 

But the damage was done, even if it receives negligible attention.  Roughly 6,000 U.S. servicemembers died in our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures.  Their absence is surely felt by their loved ones.  Around half a million receive VA compensation for disabilities incurred in the two conflicts.

There is a tendency to just look at our own losses without accounting for the innocent bystanders.  The number of Iraqi civilians whose deaths were connected to the war varies by source but most put it well into six figures (not including casualties from the later Islamic State insurgency).  The toll the conflict took on Iraq’s infrastructure (outside the Kurdish northern region) may not be remedied for years, if ever.  Iraq ranks low on many human development indices.  (The United Nations Development Programme ranks the country slightly above the less developed countries of the Global South.)

The topic of the post-9/11 conflicts seldom arises among my students.  There are fewer veterans of these wars in my classes.  Most of the seats are filled with Gen Zers and younger Millennials who either hadn’t been born yet or have little or no memory of the time.  Most of the decisionmakers who cooked up (or at least went along with) these schemes are either dead (Powell, Rumsfeld) or are no longer in government service (Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al.).  Perhaps any lessons learned are beside the point for younger generations due to their removal from the present, opening the door for future misjudgments.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

The Good Fight

There are only a handful of surviving Second World War veterans.  This week’s D-Day commemorations here and abroad remind us, as with those of recent years, that their time with us is short.

Being the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion, the spotlight shone especially bright.  President Trump stood alongside Queen Elizabeth at the celebration in Portsmouth, as actors read from the letters and diaries of those who served and jet fighters performed fly-bys in between rousing song and dance numbers.  Theresa May and Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron each spoke, as did Trump himself.  The Queen gave the closing remarks, praising the resilience of the war generation.

Her Majesty is well aware of the thin strand the living vets represent, linking us in the present with the deeds of the past.  She is herself a Second World War veteran in a manner of speaking, having served in the British army at home during the war’s last year or two (though she returned to Buckingham Palace each evening).  This year’s commemoration will likely be the last to be celebrated on such a large scale.

Here in America, we subscribe to the same mythos surrounding that war.  It was a good fight, we were unquestionably the good guys, and the enemy, particularly the Germans, were evil.  It has been so even before the guns fell silent.  When I was a kid, the WW2 vets were fixtures in the community who shared their stories with elementary school classes and served as community and business leaders.

Sometime in the mid-Nineties, as the veterans began passing away in noticeable numbers, popular culture became particularly laudatory in its treatment of them.  Even as films and literature treated our other recent wars, particularly Vietnam, as morally ambiguous at best, the black and white view of the Second World War persisted.  Five decades after it ended, mythology became hagiography.  Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign was lauded by the talking heads as one last call to service even as they seemed to assume that Bill Clinton, derided by conservatives as a Vietnam draft dodger, would easily win a second term.  The ever-bombastic Tom Brokaw, who himself somehow missed out on his own generation’s war, dubbed those who lived through the war years as the Greatest Generation.

It was at the movies and on cable TV where the mythologizing reached its apotheosis and shaped the narrative in the everyday discourse into the present day.  Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are of course the main culprits.  Saving Private Ryan and the miniseries Band of Brothers were both technical tours de force and powerful storytelling.  The verisimilitude of the first film in capturing the horrors of combat is striking on first viewing and it still hits hard every time thereafter.  Nevertheless, both works and the volume of derivate films and TV shows following in their wake, engage in cheerleading for an American exceptionalism that we as a nation can’t seem to let go of.

The Second World War continues to resonate because so few of our conflicts have been so morally clear cut.  Only the Civil War, on the Union side at least, possesses the same clarity of purpose in the popular mind.  The others have been mainly exercises in imperialist expansion, large and small.  The Indian Wars aren’t discussed much anymore, even though the genocide of indigenous peoples made America as we know it possible.  Even less is said of our guerrilla war in the Philippines at the turn of the last century.  The Banana Wars involved the subjugation of Latin American states for the benefit of U.S. corporations.

Our military ventures after 1945 are no less problematic.  One could make a case in favor of our intervention in Korea, given the odiousness of the North Korean regime and the fact that Harry Truman shrewdly used the United Nations as a fig leaf for our unilateral butting-in.  By comparison, we sacrificed nearly 60,000 American lives in Vietnam—not to mention the lives of countless Vietnamese—over a pretext so slim that an exchange of diplomatic notes normally serves to settle such disputes as that which led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

After a brief funk in the late 1970s, we resumed flexing our muscles and making self-serving justifications for it.  The invasion of Grenada, the smallest country in the Western Hemisphere, was justified because the Cubans gave material support to a popular revolution.  The invasion of Panama wasn’t a violation of another country’s sovereignty, it was sort of a law enforcement action to catch a drug kingpin.  But the real turning point was just around the corner.

The 1991 Gulf War brought us into the present era of militarism.  A war fought to make the world safe for Exxon was packaged partly as a media event and partly as a case for ramped up interventionism cloaked as the liberation of oppressed peoples.  (Liberation of the oppressed—just like in the Second World War!)  We are now at the point where more than 70 countries host U.S. military bases.  The public has been culturally intimidated into supporting our ventures abroad, and attempts to debate the matter in the mainstream are a non-starter as a consequence.   

In a college history class, we were assigned to read Empire as a Way of Life by William Appleman Williams.  This was circa 1984, and revisionist historian Williams was somewhat passé even then and he is mostly forgotten today.  That’s too bad.  Empire as a Way of Life is a plainly worded account of America’s imperial adventures as the prominent, recurring theme in American history.  Williams made a moral argument for rejecting imperialism and embracing a renewed role for the United States as an ethical member of the family of nations.

Williams the man was a singular character.  A military brat, an Annapolis graduate, and a Second World War veteran, he left the Navy to pursue an academic career.  (The circumstances leading to this have been described variously as an early retirement for service-related injuries or for those inflicted upon him while participating in a civil rights march in the Deep South.)  By the 1960s, Williams was a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in a history department featuring such luminaries as George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg.  Williams was a high-profile participant in the intellectual controversies of the era, opposing the Vietnam War while locking horns on occasion with the campus New Left.

Williams’ career stalled a bit the following decade as the discourse surrounding American history and foreign policy shifted and morphed and his work was nudged to the margins.  He migrated westward and concluded his career at Oregon State University.  Distrustful of large institutions, he continued to argue for a return to decentralized government which mirrored his critiques of U.S. foreign policy.  Williams retired in 1980 and died ten years later.

When the Iraq War was at its height, Williams’ writings enjoyed a minor renaissance thanks to academics like Andrew Bacevich but remain fairly obscure.  However, Williams’ ideas retain a certain authority applicable to our present predicament.  We must face the truth that few fights are truly good fights and address the questions of war and peace in language detached from nationalistic sentimentality.  When this discussion takes place at last, may the spirit of Dr. Williams moderate.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar 

Mission Accomplished?

Today was a violent one in the democratic paradise we’ve imposed on Iraq.  Over 100 people died in sectarian violence…a phrase that is a neat turn of journalism-speak, a dry, dispassionate way of saying that a lot of innocent people met a horrific end because they adhered to the wrong religious doctrine.

Mission accomplished?  Hardly.  The Bush administration...at home and abroad, almost four years after it left office it’s the gift from hell that keeps on giving…